National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden called out Sen. Dianne Feinstein after her fiery floor speech Tuesday assailing the CIA, calling her anger hypocritical.”We’re seeing another ‘Merkel Effect,’ where an elected official does not care at all that the rights of millions of ordinary citizens are violated by our spies, but suddenly it’s a scandal when a politician finds out the same thing happens to them.” — Edward Snowden, on Diane Feinstein’s anger about NSA surveillance
Snowden released a statement after the California Democrat spent nearly an hour on the Senate floor decrying the CIA for accessing Senate Intelligence Committee computers and interfering with staffers’ investigations into CIA interrogation tactics.
“It’s clear the CIA was trying to play ‘keep away’ with documents relevant to an investigation by their overseers in Congress, and that’s a serious constitutional concern,” Snowden said in a statement to NBC News and confirmed to POLITICO by a Snowden associate. “But it’s equally if not more concerning that we’re seeing another ‘Merkel Effect,’ where an elected official does not care at all that the rights of millions of ordinary citizens are violated by our spies, but suddenly it’s a scandal when a politician finds out the same thing happens to them.”
The “Merkel Effect” was an apparent reference to disclosures that the U.S. monitored the private phone conversations of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, which prompted her to angrily demand an explanation from President Barack Obama.
